Amid Invisible Terror: The Righteous Anger of A Fukushima Farmer Poet

Maeda Arata with an introduction by Satoko Oka Norimatsu

A farmer’s poem, "Amid Invisible Terror, We Were Witnesses", first appeared in the July 18 edition of Shimbun Nomin (Newspaper “Farmer”), a publication ofthe Japan Family Farmers Movement “Nominren,” and was immediately recited at anti-nuclear rallies across the nation. Maeda Arata, a seventy-five year old farmer, poet and writer, lives in Aizumisato-machi in eastern Fukushima. The poem was written four months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster of March 11, 2011. Now, a year later, the fury and despair that the poem conveys continues to speak for hundreds of thousands of residents who lost their homes, land, family members and livelihood. Nothing is more devastating for farmers than the radioactive contamination and destruction of the food they grow with love and care. On March 29, 2011, a sixty-four year old cabbage farmer in Sukagawa hanged himself, all hope shuttered following the newly announced government restriction on the consumption of cabbage from Fukushima. To Maeda, national policy that deprives farmers of livelihood, and life itself, is reminiscent of the wartime events that sacrificed people’s lives for a purported national interest that prioritized colonial subjugation and exploitation of neighbouring countries. Goto Nobuyo, an economist who teaches at Fukushima Medical University, read this poem at a conference on the Fukushima nuclear crisis at UC Berkeley in October 2011, moving the Berkeley modern Japanese historian Andrew Barshay to translate it into English. Goto observed that most of the artistic and literary expressions responding to the Fukushima crisis revolve around uncritical cheerful messages such as “I love Fukushima” and “Ganbare (Chin up) Fukushima!” They suppress, in effect, the widespread anger at TEPCO and the Japanese state, still more the protest movements such as those of Fukushima women demanding the protection of children from radiation, and the anti-nuclear movements that surged over the last year. William Pesek, a Bloomberg columnist described a recent comment by Prime Minister Noda “jawdropping” – one in which he said, “no individual could be held responsible for the nuclear fallout and that everyone should ‘share the pain,’” in the country where CEOs of big corporations like Olympus, and even a prime minister got jailed for book cooking and bribery.1 Maeda’s literary voice is, therefore, all the more precious, inviting us to reflect on questions of responsibility and appropriate action in the face of Japan’s multiple disasters.

Note

1 William Pesek, “Forget the yakuza, the nuclear mob should be the ones sent to jail,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 10, 2011. Link